Fascinating article in today's Sunday Times by its former editor Harold Evans on the murder in Cairo in 1977 of the paper's chief foreign correspondent David Holden.
In a piece taken from his soon to be published autobiography, My Paper Chase, Evans says that Holden's murder could have been a joint operation by the CIA and the Egyptians.
He also claims that thefts from the Sunday Times at the time of the murder suggested that there was a spy on the paper who tracked Holden's movements in the Middle East.
Evans conclusion is startling: "In the mists of circumstance and conjecture, we are left only with the certainty that Holden was foully murdered and with the aching suspicion that he died not for journalism but for some secret cause he had betrayed.
We should give him the benefit of the doubt — but no journalist should ever agree to act for an intelligence agency, whatever the invocation or however strong the desire to be patriotic."
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1 comment:
Yes, it was typical 1970s Evans Insight team stuff.
At the end of the article -- and after a bit of Googling of my own on the victim -- it's not so much who killed him but more a case of who really was this guy David Holden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Holden
"After a three-year stint as a schoolteacher in Scotland, he worked as a professional actor, then returned to North America, where he wandered as an odd-job man in the U. S. and Mexico.In 1955 he was recruited as an assistant correspondent in Washington by The Times . . . "
It seems to me that, even for the 1950s, Holden's case for a Times assistant correspondant job were quite poor. That he was transferred within 1 year to a hotspot like the Middle East during Suez is more astonishing still. Did this chap speak Arabic ? Was there no better qualified person available to The Times ? It seems more and more like it was a 'court' of US contacts (gained somehow in the early 1950s) that lifted him into this orbit in the first place. Which, of course, makes the suggestion of CIA involvement all the more likely.
I think a full INSIGHT job on old David Holden might make for fascinating reading on a wet Sunday afternoon . . . .
Kayo
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